It’s not every day that you find out your old high school headteacher is going to appear on ITV’s flagship quiz show The Chase.
But today is that day for me.
Sadly, I only heard the good news about Tim McCarthy – or Mr McCarthy as I’ve always, always called him – starring alongside Bradley Walsh after hearing the worst news of all.
Mr McCarthy died earlier this year, aged just 64, after a long illness, which I’m sure he faced with the same spirit and determination that he put into educating a bunch of misbehaving kids from Stockport.
He recorded his episode of The Chase a few months ago, apparently after finding out he was terminally ill and that he didn’t have too much time left.
His wife Rachel told the BBC: ‘He was so excited when he was selected for the show, even though he was very ill. [Watching the episode is] going to be very difficult, but it was part of his bucket list.’
Nobody knows if Tim won, his friend Stuart revealed to the broadcaster: ‘He never told us who won, so we can’t wait to see what happened. He was a brilliant friend with a brilliant mind.’
When I first met Mr McCarthy in 2005, he was the headteacher of Avondale High School – a tiny, almost forgotten school in south Manchester that had no money and had flirted with Ofsted’s special measures category.
Our most notable alumnus at the time was Daz Sampson, the UK’s 2006 Eurovision entry, who’d previously had top 10 hits either side of the millennium with dance acts Bus Stop and Uniting Nations.
This was a decade before Stockport-born Deputy Prime Minister and former Avondale student Angela Rayner made herself known in British politics.
Five years before I joined, Mr McCarthy had won £1,000 after placing a bet on Avondale’s graduating class of 2000 – he reckoned their GCSE results would improve on those from 1999. He shared the winnings with the kids who’d earned it.
He was that sort of teacher and that kind of person.
It was that brand of charisma, that kind of passion, and that kind of belief in the potential of children that convinced my parents to send me to Avondale – even after the headteacher of my primary school had privately implored them not to.
During my second year at Avondale, we got word that the school was losing money and was likely to be closed, leaving the staff and pupils with nowhere to go.
There were only 650 kids in the entire school, with nearby schools boasting larger numbers and better Ofsted reports. Avondale was doomed.
Up stepped Mr McCarthy.
He convinced the United Learning Trust (ULT) to part with £27million (‘and 55p!’ he would always remind us, with a laugh) and build a new school adjacent to the Avondale site, keeping everybody together.
Just a couple of years prior, England superstar footballer Wayne Rooney had moved from Everton FC to Manchester United for the price of £27m. He joked that we were worth 55p more than United’s new striker.
Deep down, I think he really believed that about us.
Stockport Academy was founded in 2007. It took a few years to get back in Ofsted’s good books – and Mr McCarthy left in 2010 to join the Aurora Academies Trust, setting up schools in Dubai and India – but we got there eventually.
He didn’t work alone, but, in persuading the ULT to build the new school in the first place, Mr McCarthy set in motion events that have seen the number of pupils at the school grow from 650 to beyond 1,000. Ofsted reckons it’s a good school these days, too.
And it wasn’t long after his departure that our little school got an England superstar footballer of its own: a sporty 11-year-old boy named Phillip Foden attended between 2011 and 2012.
On a personal note, it was at Stockport Academy that I was encouraged to take Media Studies and English as GCSEs, which eventually put me on the road to writing for Metro. You can thank (or blame) Mr McCarthy for that.
I’ve been reading as much as I can about my former headteacher ever since I found out about his death – which was so tragically premature. Yet nowhere did I see it written down that he saved the futures of 650 children who were little more than statistics to the people working above him.
His legacy lives on in the fact that Stockport Academy still exists and continues to thrive, giving the children of Edgeley and Cheadle Heath another impressive school to choose from.
Mr McCarthy’s wife Rachel and the rest of his family, as well as some of his closest friends, are all piling into his local pub The Colliers at 5pm on Wednesday evening to watch him go up against the Chasers.
Good luck, Sir. Wherever you are.
Watch The Chase on ITV at 5pm on weekdays.
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